ASC honors Chris Menges

Filmmaker to receive International Achievement Award

The American Society of Cinematographers has selected Chris Menges as the recipient of its International Achievement Award. Kudo will be presented at the 24th ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards at the Century Plaza on Feb. 27.

Menges won Oscars for “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission” and was nommed for “Michael Collins” and “The Reader.” Other credits include “Black Beauty,” “The Boxer,” “Dirty Pretty Things,” “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” “Notes on a Scandal,” “The Yellow Handkerchief” and “Stop-Loss.”

“Chris Menges has dedicated his career to helping to create films that tell the important stories of our times,” said ASC president Michael Goi.

When he was 22, Granada Television sent Menges to South Africa to shoot a clandestine documentary about Nelson Mandela being imprisoned and the banning of the African National Congress. During the next several years, he shot documentaries in Rhodesia, Angola, the Congo, Cyprus, in the jungles of Burma, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, in Egypt during the 1967 war and in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Menges earned his first narrative film credit for “Kes” in 1969. He was the second unit cinematographer on “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”